On Lights

On Lights
Mar 17th 2008
wolfmoonsleddog
Alaska
Location: Ester, AK
Time - 1:39pm
Temperature: 12 degrees F
Conditions: Sunny, cool
Forecast: Partly cloudy today and tomorrow. Low of -5, highs in the teens.

Lights. You know the ones I’m talking about. Those icy streaks and veils that appear out of nowhere and dance in the sky. The aurora borealis. The Northern lights.

Fairbanks, which is very near here, is considered the Northern lights capitol of the world. Apparently you see the Lights more in this area than you do to the North or South. Interesting.

Now everyone has heard the explanation of what causes auroral phenomenon. Solar winds colliding with particles in the atmosphere and whatnot. Google it if you are interested, I’m not going to go into that here.

I first saw the Lights when I was here last August. Then they were very faint, a barely visible streak low in the sky that you could not see if you looked directly at it.

That is not the case this time of year. Right now, although the days are becoming longer and the onset of Spring is nearly upon us, we have plenty of darkness. Long nights to sit up late and skywatch.

At first, I was just getting up every hour and peeking outside. I didn’t see anything so I went back to bed. I didn’t realize that, if you really want to see the Lights, you have to stay up and watch for them. They can appear in an instant and be gone just as quickly.

You might not even notice them at first if you don’t know what to look for. Often, they won’t be as brightly colored as in films and photos. One reason for this is because cameras capture light and images differently than a human eye. What might look a smoky gray or white with the naked eye can appear bright green through a camera lens. But don’t think that makes the Lights any less spectacular.

The 4th of July has nothing on an interior mid-March night.

Some nights you might see just a smoky arc that fades in and out. Others, the arc might shimmer and wave and turn into curtains along the horizon. It might light up the treeline and shoot arcs up into the sky. And sometimes those arcs break free of the horizon and the whole sky becomes a blaze of dancing shapes of light.

The other night, I could look South and see the Lights. Everywhere I looked there was something going on. Mostly a vague greenish color but sometimes with a tinge of purple. Some of it right overhead. Dazzling.

To sit up on a bright Alaskan night. Nothing else like that either.